I just read your post about the paper. Thank you so much for reading it and commenting on it.
I wrote the paper almost 15 years ago, but the basic argument is
simple and still seems to me to be sound (McDowell has since retracted
the idea, which was the target of my paper, that our experience contains
claims, or has propositional content):
The content of a judgment (what Travis later came to call
‘auto-representation’) of perception, and similarly the content of an
utterance describing what someone else is seeing, or saw, just like the
content of
any utterance, is context-dependent. So of course I could, given a
suitable context, say what you see, and you could say what you see, and
it could also be said that what you said was the same as what I said—so
we could be said to be attributing the
same content to your visual experience. But the content of any of those
utterances is context-dependent—the words by themselves, apart from
some suitable context, (would) leave it
indeterminate. And the problem with McDowell (of Mind and World and ‘Having the World in View’) is that he wants to say—he SAYS—that
the very same content that such utterances would have, was somehow already in the experience—independently
from being articulated in one way or another, in a context suitable for
such articulation (Travis would say independently of being
auto-represented)—just
by virtue of your being a competent speaker and awake, and facing the
cube, or the tree. And THAT idea, I argue, cannot be made sense of. In
attempting to make sense of it, McDowell relies on
the words that could, given a suitable context, be used to
say what someone (or oneself) sees, or saw. And that reliance betrays a
misunderstanding—which I suspect McDowell himself would have disavowed
if it were presented to him explicitly—of
how language functions.
Best,
Avner”
